A wireless telecommunications system has been proposed with a central terminal, or station, at a central location in wireless communication with a plurality of subscriber terminals, or stations, at subscriber locations to implement a wireless telephony system. The system is intended to be used with fixed subscriber locations rather than the more familiar mobile cellular telephone systems.
The system finds a wide variety of possible applications, for example in rural, remote, or sparsely populated areas where the cost of laying permanent wire or optical networks would be too expensive, in heavily built-up areas where conventional wired systems are at full capacity or the cost of laying such systems would involve too much interruption to the existing infrastructure or be too expensive, and so on.
In the proposed system, the subscriber terminal is required to perform wireless transmission and reception tasks, signal coding and decoding tasks, initialisation and authentication tasks as well conventional telephony tasks. Function for executing these tasks can be set up at the initial installation of the subscriber unit at a customer's location. However, it may be desired to update the functions available at the customer's premises after installation. Particularly bearing in mind that the subscriber stations may be widely scattered, it is inconvenient to have to visit each subscriber station in order to provide for re-programming of the subscriber station.
It may be desirable in some instances to ensure that standard installation is effected for all subscriber stations. In other instances, it may be desirable to provide different installations at different subscriber stations. The administration in ensuring that installers have the correct equipment at subscriber stations is significant. Accordingly, it can be seen that the programming and installation of subscriber stations is a potentially costly and inconvenient operation. The invention seeks to address these problems.